Apple may have to come very clean about how this works or it may not hold up in court.
I doubt it is intended to hold up in court. More likely the idea is to provide the phone's owner (perhaps in conjunction with the police) with information about who took their phone, so that they then know where to look to find more solid evidence.
I hate to be the guy who suggests that the US military spend yet more taxpayer dollars on the "next new thing", but perhaps some of their problems could be addresses by replacing their current simulators with VR headsets and PCs?
Their current approach seems to be largely the "cave" approach, where the trainee sits inside a room by himself and images are projected on the walls around him. That's fine as far as it goes, but doing it that is by its nature expensive and takes a lot of space, which means not very many people can be using the simulator at once, which limits the military's ability to train groups of trainees how to co-ordinate their behavior with each other.
Replace that with a networked gaming PC and an Oculus Rift (or similar) for each trainee, and I think you could provide a similarly immersive experience to a lot more people simultaneously, for about the same price.
Well, I'll be the counter-anecdote, then. When I bought my iPhone6+, after about two weeks it started to compulsively touch itself. For example, I could be looking at a Google Map (not doing anything, just looking at the phone while it sat on the table), and suddenly the map would spontaneously scroll from my location in LA to somewhere in Utah, all on its own; as if it had received a touch event somewhere way off the edge of the screen. Similar strange spontaneous behaviors would occur in all other apps (and even on the "Desktop") at random times, every few minutes, and it was enough to drive anyone crazy.
I took the onanistic iPhone6+ back to the Apple store back for a replacement, and so far the replacement has had no problems (knock on wood).
Politicians are always the same. All they do is appeal to whatever they see as the current mentality that will get them (re)elected.
There's a name for politicians that don't do that -- they are called "non-politicians". You don't get to govern if you can't get into (or stay in) office.
There's a clear Darwinian-style process at work there.
I think it depends on whose DSL you are using. My mom was paying $95/month for phone+DSL that was slow when it worked, and often didn't work at all. When she complained, AT&T reduced her monthly bill to make up for the poor performance, but even then she was paying $75/month for phone+Internet service that was inadequate and painful to use.
Eventually we switched her Internet and phone lines over to cable (Comcast), and now she is much happier, can stream video reliably, doesn't call me up regularly to ask why her computer "isn't working" today.... and is paying less than before.
TL;DR: service quality depends a lot on which neighborhood you live in.
... plus even if it was true, most people would still vote for one of those two candidates, because the anti-Trump people really don't want to see Trump in office, and the anti-Hillary people really don't want to see Hillary in office. In those circumstances, very few of them will be willing to effectively annul their influence on the election by throwing their vote away on a third-party candidate who isn't going to win anyway.
Now if we had a third-party candidate who was polling competitively with the two first-party candidates, or if we had a voting system that didn't suffer significantly from the spoiler effect, things might be different. But we don't, so they aren't.
I can get in my 8000lb truck and drive 600+ miles before needing to refuel... and I can stop at nearly any fuel station to fill her up with 30+ gallons in 2-3 minutes(diesel pumps tend to be MUCH faster than gas pumps).
All very true, and a definite advantage for fuel-powered cars over battery-powered cars, in scenarios involving long-distance travel.
However, most people do not drive 600 miles at a stretch, so for them, there is not much advantage in being theoretically able to do so.
Just like with cell phones, as long as the car's battery can reliably last you until you're ready to plug in for the night and go to sleep, that's good enough. It will be fully charged again in the morning; any capacity above that is gravy.
They could be properly maintained during this part of the life cycle, but does anybody seriously think they will be? The cost/benefit for these batteries implies keeping costs low. There will be scrap batteries over the place being squeezed into use until they are completely depleted, meaning there will be lots of batteries not being properly maintained.
If battery maintenance turns out to be a problem (and it's not clear that it actually will be; what sort of maintenance, exactly, would these batteries require?), it seems like it would be easy enough to deal with: Add a $X deposit to the batteries' purchase price, and pay the deposit out when they are recycled. Et voila, now there's an economic incentive to properly recycle any battery old enough to be worth less than $X, rather than just letting it sit until it's worthless junk.
We've dealt with this problem before (e.g. for 12V lead-acid automobile-starter batteries); solutions are known.
*The world's next energy revolution is always more than five or ten years away.*
The trick is to put yourself into suspended animation (or go off-grid on a desert island) for 5-10 years. That way, when you come back, you'll appreciate everything that has changed while you were away.
If you keep up with every days' minor incremental progress, it's easy to lose sight of the overall progress that the increments have added up to.
who really wants to have a nuclear reactor going up in the air, something goes wrong and the US will be turned to dust and be inhabitable for 1000 years.
I don't claim to be a nuclear scientist, but I'm pretty sure that even in the worst-case scenario that would not happen.
Now I don't run Apple's OS X or Microsoft's Windows OS so it's not like I am taking a big risk here.
Not to disagree, but perhaps your biggest security advantage is that the hackers of the world have no particular reason to suspect there is a significant profit to be gained by hacking your (as far as anyone knows) random computer.
The computers at SomeWellKnownBitcoinExchange.com, OTOH, are assumed to be holding large amounts of bitcoin, since they need to do so in order to fill their function, and thus they are going to be hacker magnets 24/7/365. And all it takes is one security hole (or dishonest employee), and presto, it's game over...
It makes a lot of sense, if you want to avoid people having to manually determine on a case-by-case basis whether each and every text containing a gun-emoji was intended to be a death threat, or not.
Yes, it's possible to manually categorize in most cases using context, but how many false-positive ("local teen arrested for after his innocent tweet was misinterpreted as a threat") and false-negative ("mass killer had been sending out emoji threats for a week, but people thought they were jokes") fiascos do we want to deal with every week?
By replacing the gun-emoji with a water-gun emoji, the intended meaning is clearer -- and if you actually want to send someone a death threat, you'll have to type it out in words (e.g. "I am going to shoot you").
It takes 3 or 4 phone calls, and some "do not disclose" paperwork in order to find out that you won't save any money, and you won't own anything.
Our condo building's HOA has been saving about $300/month for the last 5 years via a SolarCity PPA.
It's true we don't (and won't) own anything, but for us that is a benefit -- that means that if something breaks, we're not on the hook to fix it. If the system ever goes down, it's SolarCity who loses money until it gets fixed, not us (since we pay per kWh generated, not per month). Since nobody on the HOA board is an electrician or technically minded, the zero-responsibility-for-maintenance aspect is important.
The upshot is: $300/month savings on our power bill, with no risk to us, and no money out of the HOA's pocket, ever. The only thing we had to give up was some space on our roof, which wasn't being used for anything anyway.
A firewall would do just as well as NAT without the overhead of NAT
... but only if it was actually installed, which I believe is the parent poster's point. Because NAT has become largely necessary for IPv4 access, people have a motivation to install and use it. (People should be motivated by security concerns as well, of course, but all too often they are not, because good security isn't necessary to get the system working ASAP, and sometimes gets in the way of getting the system working)
Have been inside NSA facility, can confirm they are not dumb enough to have webcams, or for that matter non air gapped systems.
How do they share information amongst their computers then? The only thing I can imagine is via sneakernet, but of course malware can and does propagate via USB keys and laptops also, so it seems like even that might not be sufficient.
I suppose printing everything to paper and then typing it all back in on the next computer might be secure (assuming the typist recognizes malware before he types it in;)), but that doesn't sound very practical.
I don't know if it's obvious, but the missing thing is that this won't be the final word in automation of home agriculture.
I remember back when the first PCs came out, and they were rather ridiculous -- the amount of time it required to get them to do anything useful was such that it would almost certainly be easier to accomplish the same task with pen and paper, or with a typewriter.
But a certain type of person was drawn to them anyway, not because they were immediately useful, but because that person wanted explore what was possible and see how much further the ideas could be taken. And now, 40-some years later, we have inexpensive PCs and cell phones that are much more powerful than any other method, to the extent that most people wouldn't even consider handling most problems the "traditional way" as a realistic approach anymore.
Or, as Ben Franklin put it, you might as well ask, "What good is a newborn baby?"
... and thus, another (somewhat) funny joke dies, by being mercilessly reduced to an uninteresting math problem. Congratulations, Slashdot pedants, you've bagged another one! All those people who doubted your word-problems-solving skills will doubt you no more!
Well, get going and do it already. If it can perform the same functions and reliably survive under battlefield conditions, you can probably mark it up by $400K and make a bundle on every unit you sell.
Everyone's. The core principle of NATO is that an attack on any NATO member will be treated as an attack on all NATO members. Thus, traditionally, Russia would be very reluctant to attack any NATO member because it would be guaranteed to bring about a strong counterattack, which at best would be costly to all parties and at worst could escalate into World War 3, which not even Putin wants.
However, if Russia has cause to believe that the USA will not honor its commitments to NATO, that could tempt Russia to try to "take back" one or more of the East European countries it lost after the cold war (similar to the way it "took back" part of the Ukraine in 2014).
By his loose talk, Trump has given Russia (and the world) cause to believe that he might decide not defend all NATO members; that the commitments of the USA might not be honored if Trump is elected.
So let's imagine that Trump is elected, and then Russia bets that Trump won't bother to defend, say, Lithuania, and so Russia sends in their troops to "reclaim" Lithuania.
Now what happens? Either Trump doesn't respond, in which case NATO is exposed a paper tiger, and Russia (and potentially others) now feel free to invade more countries when they want to; or Trump does respond, and now we're involved in a hot war with Russia that could easily turn nuclear.
Either outcome sucks. That's why politics at this level isn't a game, and shouldn't be treated as one. Trump's words have real consequences, even if he thinks he is only joking (or more likely, just isn't thinking at all).
I'm sure that's the question that Tesla's engineers are asking each other right now. Since I'm not a Tesla engineer, I don't have the answer -- maybe it will require more hardware. I do know that a product that doesn't reliably take the location of its owner's head into account when doing its collision-prediction calculations is a product that is going to have trouble in the marketplace.
Slashdot Mirror
Half of people click on this rubbish articles too. Is this the slashdot I used to know?
Yes: it was always like this.
Apple may have to come very clean about how this works or it may not hold up in court.
I doubt it is intended to hold up in court. More likely the idea is to provide the phone's owner (perhaps in conjunction with the police) with information about who took their phone, so that they then know where to look to find more solid evidence.
I hate to be the guy who suggests that the US military spend yet more taxpayer dollars on the "next new thing", but perhaps some of their problems could be addresses by replacing their current simulators with VR headsets and PCs?
Their current approach seems to be largely the "cave" approach, where the trainee sits inside a room by himself and images are projected on the walls around him. That's fine as far as it goes, but doing it that is by its nature expensive and takes a lot of space, which means not very many people can be using the simulator at once, which limits the military's ability to train groups of trainees how to co-ordinate their behavior with each other.
Replace that with a networked gaming PC and an Oculus Rift (or similar) for each trainee, and I think you could provide a similarly immersive experience to a lot more people simultaneously, for about the same price.
Well, I'll be the counter-anecdote, then. When I bought my iPhone6+, after about two weeks it started to compulsively touch itself. For example, I could be looking at a Google Map (not doing anything, just looking at the phone while it sat on the table), and suddenly the map would spontaneously scroll from my location in LA to somewhere in Utah, all on its own; as if it had received a touch event somewhere way off the edge of the screen. Similar strange spontaneous behaviors would occur in all other apps (and even on the "Desktop") at random times, every few minutes, and it was enough to drive anyone crazy.
I took the onanistic iPhone6+ back to the Apple store back for a replacement, and so far the replacement has had no problems (knock on wood).
Politicians are always the same. All they do is appeal to whatever they see as the current mentality that will get them (re)elected.
There's a name for politicians that don't do that -- they are called "non-politicians". You don't get to govern if you can't get into (or stay in) office.
There's a clear Darwinian-style process at work there.
I think it depends on whose DSL you are using. My mom was paying $95/month for phone+DSL that was slow when it worked, and often didn't work at all. When she complained, AT&T reduced her monthly bill to make up for the poor performance, but even then she was paying $75/month for phone+Internet service that was inadequate and painful to use.
Eventually we switched her Internet and phone lines over to cable (Comcast), and now she is much happier, can stream video reliably, doesn't call me up regularly to ask why her computer "isn't working" today.... and is paying less than before.
TL;DR: service quality depends a lot on which neighborhood you live in.
How much worse would you like things to get? A little bit worse, or a lot worse?
If you like meeting totally random people that much, why not just walk up to someone on the street and introduce yourself?
Doing that disturbs people; they assume you have some unpleasant ulterior motive. It might work in a bar, though.
>No one wants Trump or Hilary,
This is demonstrably wrong.
... plus even if it was true, most people would still vote for one of those two candidates, because the anti-Trump people really don't want to see Trump in office, and the anti-Hillary people really don't want to see Hillary in office. In those circumstances, very few of them will be willing to effectively annul their influence on the election by throwing their vote away on a third-party candidate who isn't going to win anyway.
Now if we had a third-party candidate who was polling competitively with the two first-party candidates, or if we had a voting system that didn't suffer significantly from the spoiler effect, things might be different. But we don't, so they aren't.
I can get in my 8000lb truck and drive 600+ miles before needing to refuel... and I can stop at nearly any fuel station to fill her up with 30+ gallons in 2-3 minutes(diesel pumps tend to be MUCH faster than gas pumps).
All very true, and a definite advantage for fuel-powered cars over battery-powered cars, in scenarios involving long-distance travel.
However, most people do not drive 600 miles at a stretch, so for them, there is not much advantage in being theoretically able to do so.
Just like with cell phones, as long as the car's battery can reliably last you until you're ready to plug in for the night and go to sleep, that's good enough. It will be fully charged again in the morning; any capacity above that is gravy.
The problem isn't the languages, it's the people.
Quite right! So the sooner we engineer the people out of the process, the better. ;)
They could be properly maintained during this part of the life cycle, but does anybody seriously think they will be? The cost/benefit for these batteries implies keeping costs low. There will be scrap batteries over the place being squeezed into use until they are completely depleted, meaning there will be lots of batteries not being properly maintained.
If battery maintenance turns out to be a problem (and it's not clear that it actually will be; what sort of maintenance, exactly, would these batteries require?), it seems like it would be easy enough to deal with: Add a $X deposit to the batteries' purchase price, and pay the deposit out when they are recycled. Et voila, now there's an economic incentive to properly recycle any battery old enough to be worth less than $X, rather than just letting it sit until it's worthless junk.
We've dealt with this problem before (e.g. for 12V lead-acid automobile-starter batteries); solutions are known.
*The world's next energy revolution is always more than five or ten years away.*
The trick is to put yourself into suspended animation (or go off-grid on a desert island) for 5-10 years. That way, when you come back, you'll appreciate everything that has changed while you were away.
If you keep up with every days' minor incremental progress, it's easy to lose sight of the overall progress that the increments have added up to.
who really wants to have a nuclear reactor going up in the air, something goes wrong and the US will be turned to dust and be inhabitable for 1000 years.
I don't claim to be a nuclear scientist, but I'm pretty sure that even in the worst-case scenario that would not happen.
Now I don't run Apple's OS X or Microsoft's Windows OS so it's not like I am taking a big risk here.
Not to disagree, but perhaps your biggest security advantage is that the hackers of the world have no particular reason to suspect there is a significant profit to be gained by hacking your (as far as anyone knows) random computer.
The computers at SomeWellKnownBitcoinExchange.com, OTOH, are assumed to be holding large amounts of bitcoin, since they need to do so in order to fill their function, and thus they are going to be hacker magnets 24/7/365. And all it takes is one security hole (or dishonest employee), and presto, it's game over...
It makes a lot of sense, if you want to avoid people having to manually determine on a case-by-case basis whether each and every text containing a gun-emoji was intended to be a death threat, or not.
Yes, it's possible to manually categorize in most cases using context, but how many false-positive ("local teen arrested for after his innocent tweet was misinterpreted as a threat") and false-negative ("mass killer had been sending out emoji threats for a week, but people thought they were jokes") fiascos do we want to deal with every week?
By replacing the gun-emoji with a water-gun emoji, the intended meaning is clearer -- and if you actually want to send someone a death threat, you'll have to type it out in words (e.g. "I am going to shoot you").
It takes 3 or 4 phone calls, and some "do not disclose" paperwork in order to find out that you won't save any money, and you won't own anything.
Our condo building's HOA has been saving about $300/month for the last 5 years via a SolarCity PPA.
It's true we don't (and won't) own anything, but for us that is a benefit -- that means that if something breaks, we're not on the hook to fix it. If the system ever goes down, it's SolarCity who loses money until it gets fixed, not us (since we pay per kWh generated, not per month). Since nobody on the HOA board is an electrician or technically minded, the zero-responsibility-for-maintenance aspect is important.
The upshot is: $300/month savings on our power bill, with no risk to us, and no money out of the HOA's pocket, ever. The only thing we had to give up was some space on our roof, which wasn't being used for anything anyway.
A firewall would do just as well as NAT without the overhead of NAT
... but only if it was actually installed, which I believe is the parent poster's point. Because NAT has become largely necessary for IPv4 access, people have a motivation to install and use it. (People should be motivated by security concerns as well, of course, but all too often they are not, because good security isn't necessary to get the system working ASAP, and sometimes gets in the way of getting the system working)
Have been inside NSA facility, can confirm they are not dumb enough to have webcams, or for that matter non air gapped systems.
How do they share information amongst their computers then? The only thing I can imagine is via sneakernet, but of course malware can and does propagate via USB keys and laptops also, so it seems like even that might not be sufficient.
I suppose printing everything to paper and then typing it all back in on the next computer might be secure (assuming the typist recognizes malware before he types it in ;)), but that doesn't sound very practical.
Or am I missing something obvious?
I don't know if it's obvious, but the missing thing is that this won't be the final word in automation of home agriculture.
I remember back when the first PCs came out, and they were rather ridiculous -- the amount of time it required to get them to do anything useful was such that it would almost certainly be easier to accomplish the same task with pen and paper, or with a typewriter.
But a certain type of person was drawn to them anyway, not because they were immediately useful, but because that person wanted explore what was possible and see how much further the ideas could be taken. And now, 40-some years later, we have inexpensive PCs and cell phones that are much more powerful than any other method, to the extent that most people wouldn't even consider handling most problems the "traditional way" as a realistic approach anymore.
Or, as Ben Franklin put it, you might as well ask, "What good is a newborn baby?"
... and thus, another (somewhat) funny joke dies, by being mercilessly reduced to an uninteresting math problem. Congratulations, Slashdot pedants, you've bagged another one! All those people who doubted your word-problems-solving skills will doubt you no more!
Well, get going and do it already. If it can perform the same functions and reliably survive under battlefield conditions, you can probably mark it up by $400K and make a bundle on every unit you sell.
Second, he's trolling. Obviously.
So really, the question comes down to: Is America ready to elect its first Troll-American as President?
*Who's* national security is undermined?
Everyone's. The core principle of NATO is that an attack on any NATO member will be treated as an attack on all NATO members. Thus, traditionally, Russia would be very reluctant to attack any NATO member because it would be guaranteed to bring about a strong counterattack, which at best would be costly to all parties and at worst could escalate into World War 3, which not even Putin wants.
However, if Russia has cause to believe that the USA will not honor its commitments to NATO, that could tempt Russia to try to "take back" one or more of the East European countries it lost after the cold war (similar to the way it "took back" part of the Ukraine in 2014).
By his loose talk, Trump has given Russia (and the world) cause to believe that he might decide not defend all NATO members; that the commitments of the USA might not be honored if Trump is elected.
So let's imagine that Trump is elected, and then Russia bets that Trump won't bother to defend, say, Lithuania, and so Russia sends in their troops to "reclaim" Lithuania.
Now what happens? Either Trump doesn't respond, in which case NATO is exposed a paper tiger, and Russia (and potentially others) now feel free to invade more countries when they want to; or Trump does respond, and now we're involved in a hot war with Russia that could easily turn nuclear.
Either outcome sucks. That's why politics at this level isn't a game, and shouldn't be treated as one. Trump's words have real consequences, even if he thinks he is only joking (or more likely, just isn't thinking at all).
How would the car have been able to do this?
I'm sure that's the question that Tesla's engineers are asking each other right now. Since I'm not a Tesla engineer, I don't have the answer -- maybe it will require more hardware. I do know that a product that doesn't reliably take the location of its owner's head into account when doing its collision-prediction calculations is a product that is going to have trouble in the marketplace.